The ideal complement to the primate-oriented wildlife-viewing offered at Volcanoes and Nyungwe National Parks, Akagera is a classic savannah reserve that has undergone an ambitious recent rehabilitation programme to become a fully-fledged Big Five safari destination. As with Rwanda other national parks, the setting is spectacular: a chain of low grassy mountains that slope down...Read More
Credit: Umulinga Founded as recently as 1907, Kigali served as a minor administrative centre in the colonial era, and had a population of fewer than 6,000 when it was selection as capital of newly-independent Rwanda due to its central location in 1962. Today, this strikingly neat and modern-looking highland city sprawls attractively across a series...Read More
Protecting the Rwandan sector of the Virunga Mountains, the 160km2 Volcanoes National Park is best-known as the place where Dian Fossey launched her pioneering study of mountain gorillas in the wild in 1966, and where the Oscar-nominated film Gorillas in the Mist was shot on location in 1988. It is one of Africa’s most scenic...Read More
Lake Kivu | Credit: myafritrip.com Shared between Rwanda and the DR Congo, beautiful Lake Kivu extends for 2,370km² across the floor of the Albertine Rift, and hemmed in by a steep terraced escarpment that rises up to 1.5km above its surface. Ranked among the world’s 20 deepest and 20 most voluminous freshwater bodies, it is...Read More
Sprawling magnificently across the elevated ridge that divides Africa’s two largest drainage systems, the Nile and the Congo, the 1,015km² Nyungwe Forest National Park protects East Africa’s largest tract of montane rainforest in Eastern Africa. The park is a remarkably rich centre of biodiversity, with more than 1,050 plant species recorded, among them 200 varieties...Read More
rolling hills of rwandaCharacterised by rolling green hills terraced with cultivation, Eastern and Central Rwanda is not so scenically spectacular as the western part of the country and it supports far less endemic wildlife than the Albertine Rift. That said, the region does incorporate the national capital Kigali, the starting point of most extended explorations...Read More
Lake Kivu Rwanda’s main tourist attractions are concentrated in the far west of the country, and are mostly associated with the Albertine Rift, the well-watered arm of the Rift Valley that runs along the Congolese borders with Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and Tanzania. The dominant geographic features of western Rwanda are Lake Kivu, a vast inland...Read More
Golden monkey in Volcanoes National Park Rwanda and Uganda host a broadly similar set of attractions. Foremost among these mountain gorilla tracking, and while neither country could be said to offer a definitively better tracking experience than the other, our experience is that the more open nature of the forest in Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park...Read More
The Great Migration Mara river crossing in Kenya Rwanda offers several attractions not found in Kenya or indeed in most other safari destinations other than Uganda. Foremost among these is the opportunity to track mountain gorillas in the Virunga mountains and chimpanzees in the Nyungwe National Park. Rwanda offers far greater diversity than Kenya when...Read More
Rwanda has three main wildlife destinations, Volcanoes National Park, Nyungwe Forest National Park and Akagera National Park, each of which host a quite different fauna to the others. Birdwatching aside, wildlife viewing opportunities outside these national parks are limited. The Giant forest hog can reach a length of between 1,3 and 2,1 metres Volcanoes National...Read More